to seven dishes a-day, and prohibited the use of cranes and bustards, under a penalty. The English found out the use of a variety of roots in this reign. Queen Catharine used to send to Flanders for a sallad, but now it could be had for a song in London. The histories of this time teem with complaints of the luxury of the clergy. Indeed, we owe it to the profession to state, that they have been, at all times, the most liberal patrons of good eating. Whatever they might say in theory, they certainly admitted, by their practice, the truth of the ancient maxim, that a perfectly wise man should be as expert in the use of pleasures, as in the discharge of any of his duties: "Cui cor sapiat, ei quoque sapiat palatus:" a senti ment no where more openly acknowledged than at the Inns of Court. Elizabeth, in the magnificence of her soul, encouraged the spirit of feasting. She was a mortal enemy to fasting, as appears from the curious preambles to some of her acts.Hollinshed marks the rise of the taste for corrupt cookery in his time, by a complaint, that the nobility began to employ "musical-headed Frenchmen." James I. was no great friend to the pleasures of the table. The country gentlemen did themselves honour, mean time, by their virtuous fidelity to the traditions of their fathers; for we find a member of Parliament, of that time, declaring that a justice of peace, in his day, was a sort of animal, which for half a dozen chickens, would dispense with a dozen penal laws. The great national spirit of eating was asleep in the reign of Cromwell; and after the Restoration, when it began to peep forth occasionally at a wedding, a baptism, or a wake, the imprudent monarch pursued it by penal statutes. The last century, which may be called the dark age of eating, is eminently relieved by the circumstance of six Lord Mayors of London dying in office, in the interval of 30 years.

Where is there a nation, then, that can exhibit such a spotless shield as England? Greece and Rome affected poverty and frugality, forsooth. Milo, and some think Epicurus, saved the credit of the former. There were some

redeeming characters also amongst the Romans. With what exquisite glee does Horace chuckle over his sleek and portly person; and he positively tells us that no one could escape him during his fasting moments. 66 Impransus non qui civem dignosceret hoste." But the Emperor Vitellius, in my fancy, was worth all that sat on the same throne before and after him. His brain was not turned with sauces; it was all glorious substantial eating with him. Seven millions British, per annum, was his rate of expenditure. What a reign for the gastronomic department! What a time of saturnalia for the masticators, and their dependencies! The oldest people in the world, the Chinese, are the greatest flesheaters, and do honour to their me ritorious citizens chiefly by cramming them. The practice of sacrificing animals to the gods, proceeded from the experience which men had of the appeasing properties of a dinner. The English is the only nation which has kept off cookery and despotism. Our liberties and our dishes are placed on a permanent basis: they mutually preserve each other, and are allied in the superstitious regard of the worshipful people of England. Perhaps it is this prejudice that the legislature means to compliment, by the custom of making laws only after dinner. Amongst the Romans, the circumstance of eating salt together bound strangers to each other. In England, a dinner has almost a sacramental obligation. The policy of English monarchs has continued the coronation feast for wise purposes. I have heard a friend boast, that the late venison feast at Westminster-hall, would have inoculated the severest republican with loyalty to George IV. Happy England! secure alike from hunger and from slavery; may the spirit of eating and of freedom never forsake thy sons! May glory in arts and arms be theirs -an uncorrupted taste-keen appetite, and the huge sirloin, in which they may

With desperate knife The deep incision make, and talk the while Of England's glory ne'er to be defaced, While hence they borrow vigour.

V.

SWITZERLAND is rich in romantic scenes; but Gessner is her only poet; and even he could not rise to the sublimities which he saw around him. He was contented to lay himself by the side of a clear stream, after it had come down from its Alpine course to the meadows, and there he warbled his pastorals, and trimmed his flowery paragraphs. A mountain storm, or an avalanche, would have quite astounded him, and, in its roar, the piping of his shepherds, and his pretty lamentations for the death of Abel, would have been quite unheard.

Yet has romantic scenery been called the best nurse of poetic fancy. Dryden, we think it was, who was laughed at for proposing to write an epic, though he had never seen a mountain; and Leigh Hunt has had the "greenery" of Hampstead and its hedge-rows, turned into a mock argument against the genuineness of his poetry. Critics who so think, and so argue, must have studied the formation of poetic character much more profoundly than the facts authorise; or rather they have trampled on the facts, and trusted to the vagaries of fancy to keep them to an opinion. They ought to be able to exemplify their principle by ample appeals to the biography of eminent poets. They ought to be able to show, that Shakspeare and Milton spent their infancy and youth either in Switzerland, or in some other grand and romantic region; that Spenser sojourned for a time in fairy land; and that Dante ascended Mont Blanc, and descended into Avernus, to catch, if possible, a glimpse of the other world, before he ventured on its description. This they cannot do.

The opinion, indeed, is founded on the most presumptuous ignorance of the lives of great poets, few, if any, of whom have been natives of a romantic country, or have had opportunities of visiting picturesque scenery. All our eminent English poets, with the exception of Shakspeare, have been born or educated

in the metropolis; and we cannot conceive how the scenery of streets and squares, though to this we add the river and the parks, could ever be deemed romantic, or could be supposed to beget poetic imagery. Westminster Abbey has certainly a romantic aspect, but it is rendered tame and vulgar by the assemblage of paltry houses, and narrow streets, among which it towers like an oak half smothered with brambles and brushwood, a scanty field, should imagine, (though we embrace every scene in the vicinity of London,) for Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Cowper, to gather their materials from, for the images of poetry.

we

But the critics will turn upon us, and ask if the poets of Scotland do not furnish them with an illustrious example. They will ask if –

the land of the mountain and flood, Where the pine of the forest for ages has Where the eagle comes forth on the wings

stood,

of the storm,

And her young ones are rock'd on the lofty Cairngorm,

has not imprinted on the fancy of her bards, all the romantic grandeur which lives among her scenery, and comes with a power so irresistible upon the spirits of those who are its visitors? Their questions do not dismay us; we shall answer them.

Of the eminent poets of Scotland, Burns is indisputably the chief; and him we shall, therefore, select as an exemplification of their opinion, or its reverse, according to the truth which our inquiry shall elicit. In the poetry of Burns, there is little that is purely descriptive; and he seldom rises to grandeur and sublimity, the very conception of which overpowers the imagination by its magnificence. has no relish for the wild and the wilderness, nor does he like to soar among Alpine rocks and mountain forests. The whirlwind and the storm are too boisterous for his contemplation,-unless he is sheltered under a thick wood, and hears them

He

Nature throws her mantle green

On every field and tree,
And spreads her sheets of daisies white,
Out o'er the grassy lea;

and when spring ripens into summer, he delights to haunt "the banks and braes," where he can listen to " the burn stealing under the lang yellow broom; "--scenes like these ever recall the associations of his youthful courtships, when, as he says with inimitable sweetness,

The golden hours, on angel wings,
Flew o'er me and my dearie;
For dear to me as light and life,

Was my young Highland Mary.

A sort of pensive moral pathos seems, in his earlier pieces, to have been a predominant feeling in his mind; and to this we owe The Cotter's Saturday Night, and his lines To a Mouse, and To a Daisy,-the two latter of which, though bordering on the morbid sentimentality which is now happily out of fashion, exhibit none of its puling and whimpering, but by their melting tenderness at once come home to our best regulated feelings.

Now all these effusions of his genius are in strict accordance with the scenes where Burns spent his youth. But how do scenes of rural tameness accord with the romantic tale of Tam o' Shanter, in which the poet seems to hold unlimited sway over the wildest imagery, as if he had been cradled in a Highland glen, and had spent his midnight studies in church-yards and haunted ruins? Salvator Rosa himself, could not have pictured a wilder group than the hags revelling in the ruined church, and the half-tipsy peasant in the storm, eyeing them with mingled dread and curiosity; nor could he have better suited the landscape to his story. Our question therefore is, Where did Burns obtain the materials for the wild scenery of the tale? When we read his description, we naturally imagine that "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," must be well

worth a painter's pilgrimage, or a scene-hunter's visit:—

Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh,
By this time he was cross the ford,
Where ghaists and howlets nightly cry.—
Where in the snaw the chapman smoor'd;
And past the birks and muckle stane
Whare drucken Charlie brak's neck-bane;
And thro' the whins and by the cairn,
Where hunters found the murder'd bairn;
And near the thorn aboon the well,
Where Mungo's mither hang'd hersel.
Before him Doon pours all his floods;
The doubling storm roars thro' the woods.
The lightnings flash from pole to pole;

Near and more near the thunders roll:
Kirk-Alloway seem'd in a bleeze:
When glimmering thro' the groaning trees,

Thro' ilka bore the beams were glancing,
And loud resounded mirth and dancing.

We can only answer for ourselves, that on visiting this scene so highly wrought up by the poet, we were miserably disappointed. Kirk-Alloway, as may be seen from Grose's print, bad as it is, exhibits nothing but the naked, roofless walls of a Scots country-church, and is absolutely not larger than an English peasant's cottage, or a small barn. No stranger would ever imagine it had been a church, except from some dozen or twenty grave-stones which are nearly hid among the grass. What has been the belfry is very little larger than a bird-cage. The surrounding landscape is equally uninteresting, except in its associations with the poetry of Burns.The river Doon, whose flood, in the poem, is poured like a torrent through the glimmering trees, is a small stream, running placidly among banks covered with copse wood, and a few clumps of trees which have been planted by the proprietors of one or two comfortable-looking villas in the vicinity. The " brig" is a crazy structure of one arch, as plain and unpoetical as may be; and the village of" Shanter," whither the hero was homeward-bound when his evil star led him to take an unhallowed peep at the witches-is a row of about twenty tiled cottages, consisting of only one floor, and ranged along the highway. The whole scenery indeed, from the town of Ayr to Maybole, which includes all that young Burns could have frequented, is more tame, and uninteresting, than, per

haps, any tract of similar extent in Scotland. The only part of his visible horizon entitled to be called grand, is the bay of Ayr, and the mountainous island of Arran; but of these features of his scene he has made no

use.

After his removal from the neighbourhood of Ayr, first to Lochlea, and then to Mossgiel, his landscape, instead of being better suited to inspire his genius, was worse, at least in his immediate neighbourhood. At Lochlea, indeed, there is a small lake, but it is not much more poetical than a mill-pond, to which use it is occasionally turned. Mossgiel is a cold, barren, tree-less eminence, about a mile from Mauchline, which is a paltry, bleak-looking village, well calculated, we should imagine, to freeze the spirits of any ordinary

poet.

But we must do justice to the scenery of Ayrshire. The tameness which we have described is only partial, and is richly redeemed by the romantic views which the banks of the river Ayr present, from the village of Lorn, till it falls into the sea, a distance of about fifteen miles. The finest part of this scenery, from Lorn to Barskimming, which deserves to be better known to our Scottish tourists, is only about three miles from Mossgiel; and tradition reports, that the poet was a frequent visitor to a very picturesque spot, below Howford, where the Ayr makes its way among lofty wooded rocks, by turns overhanging and disclosing its channel. It was on this spot that he is said to have composed The Lass of Ballochmyle, after having met one morning a young lady of the Ballochmyle family, on his way to

his favourite haunt.

The song was afterwards transmitted to her, with the poet's respects; but she had the good manners, and the good taste, to return this inimitable pastoral with contempt. He could also express his contempt. Her name was instantly erased, and another substituted in its place.

We must not forget that we have

to accuse Burns of want of fidelity to his scenery, in one marked instance. In the beautiful song of My Nanny O, the first edition is

Behind yon hill where Stinchar flows, Mang moors and mosses many Oafterwards altered to

Behind yon hill where Lugar flows; because, says he, Lugar is a more poetical name than Stinchar. Unfortunately, however, for the amendment, there is neither a moor, moss,

nor hill, in the whole course of the

Lugar, though the scenery on its banks is highly romantic, particularly the famous James Boswell, of chitnear Auchinlech House, the seat of chat celebrity.

At a subsequent period, when our poet had the opportunity of visiting the finest scenery in Scotland, instead of this tending to brighten the spirit of his imagery, it seems, in most of his pieces, to have operated as a deadening spell upon his genius. The tame and poetical scenery around his native cottage, inspired him to write Tam o' Shanter; the flat and naked landscapes at Lochlea, and Mossgiel, produced the wild, unearthly imagery of the Vision,-and of Death and Dr. Hornbook; as well as the exquisite picture of the grand, the sublime, and the rothe Cotter's Saturday Night :-but mantic scenes of the Highland lakes and mountains, which now live so fresh in the lays of the "Ariosto of the North," seem to have left on the mind of Burns only a momentary trace, like the breezes on a lake, or the meteors in a summer sky. Castle Gordon is almost the only exception;-of which his description is

admirable:

Wildly here without controul,
Nature reigns, and rules the whole
In that sober, pensive mood,
Dearest to the feeling soul;
She plants the forest, pours the flood:
Life's poor day I'll musing rave,
And find at night a sheltering cave,
Where waters flow and wild woods wave,
By bonny Castle Gordon.
R.

SINCE Spenser's time, our language has grown much more critical and distinguishing; and, to use Mr. Coleridge's words, we have disbursed some of "the reversionary wealth” our ancestors left us; that is to say, we have got rid of the "equivocation' of words, and can now distinguish the individual from the class to which he belongs. We have not only a generic name, but a specific one; and he that is here so beautifully described by the poet, as an antiquarian, we hold to be only id genus, and specially distinguished from antiquarians by the hard word bibliomaniac. If this refinement be not very clear and conclusive, the reader will excuse it, since psychology and metaphysics are Mr. Coleridge's hobby, and not mine-never having had a passion for hard riding or rough roads.

But I certainly see an intelligible distinction in this instance; and I hold an antiquary to be a more outof-doors animal than Spenser describes him; one that burrows about tumuli, Roman roads, and encampments, nestles among dilapidated castles and cathedral ruins, and only retires into his "grub state" at the approach of winter, old age, or bodily infirmity.

A real antiquary is now rarely met with. It is not taking in the county histories, nor reading Grose and Pennant, nor collecting drawings of churches, or inscriptions, nor visiting tomb-stones, nor belonging to "The Society," nor writing a dull article in The Gentleman's, nor shaking hands with its Editor,-that will make an antiquary. Oh no!Antiquity is neither to be so wooed, nor so won:-she is a jealous mistress; and will engross the whole man-mind and body-intellect and passion.

It is a vulgar error that an antiquary is necessarily a dull animal. He is no more so than a poet, a painter, a musician, a lover, or any VOL. IV.

Spenser.

other man possessed by one subject with which other people want sympathy. "That a jest's prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it,' is not only true of a jest, but of all discourse; and Mr. Burke could have proved it as well as Mr. Canning. The lover and the antiquary, in fact, differ in the duration of their passion, and little else; the antiquary loves for life, the lover only swears to do so. The mistress of the one is his first love, and his last; she is ever present to his thoughts; he takes her for better for worse, and life is but a long courtship; there is no waning in his affection,-his passion increases with her age, he prefers wrinkles to dimples, and the crow's-foot at the corner, to the lustre of an eye. The mistress of an antiquary is a goddess, nymph divine, and rare, precious, celestial;" and he never descends from his high passion, to dally with mere earthly beauty. Who ever heard of Mistress Camden, Mrs. Stow, or Mrs. Speed? I would not believe there were such people, though the marriage register were brought in proof; forgery, fraud, trick, deception,-any thing would be more probable than the falsehood of my "bookish theoric:" and as to "exceptions," and those limitations with which people usually qualify their assertions, I hate them, and have, ever since I learned the first rule in the Latin Grammar. It is a beggarly way of discussing a question. If there be a hundred exceptions, never trouble me with your rule; and if it were once established, that half a dozen antiquaries had wives, I would drive them all into the herd of common-place people,but that is impossible.

If men would needs converse with a rational antiquary, there must be some "sympathy in their loves;" or they must first exorcise him-fall to with bell, book, and candle,--and even then be content to lose their labour. There are a thousand people

U